The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt

by Toby Wilkinson

  A penchant for grand architectural statements was characteristically Egyptian, but Amenemhat took it to new heights, with a project that dwarfed even his temple to Amun. Toward the middle of his reign, the king gave the order to commence construction of nothing less than a new capital city. A narrow focus on Thebes and its hinterland had been a fatal weakness of the Eleventh Dynasty, and Amenemhat was not about to make the same mistake. The only practical solution for governing a vast realm like Egypt was to place the capital at its geographical center, and that is exactly where the new dynastic city would be built. The location was at the very junction of Upper and Lower Egypt, the balance of the Two Lands. But, to signify his iron will, the king chose a starker name for the city: Amenemhat-Itj-Tawy, “Amenemhat seizes the Two Lands.” It was a bald assertion of his modus operandi—the means by which he had gained the throne, and the way in which he intended to govern.

  To mark the inauguration of his new capital, the king also adopted a new Horus name. As always, the choice reflected the monarch’s personal agenda. Out went references to “pacifying the heart of the Two Lands”; that had largely been achieved, and Itj-tawy now stood as concrete proof. Instead, the king proclaimed himself the instigator of a thoroughgoing renaissance. Under Amenemhat, Egypt would be reborn, its civilization rejuvenated, and its monarchy reestablished. If the aim was to bring back the cultural zenith of the Pyramid Age, a good way to start was by building an appropriately grand royal tomb. So, for the first time in two centuries, the order went out from the royal palace to the architects, masons, and craftsmen of Egypt. The king required a pyramid. Furthermore, it had to be on the same scale as the pyramids of the late Old Kingdom. Taking its dimensions from the royal monuments of the Sixth Dynasty, Amenemhat I’s pyramid started to rise on the desert plateau close to his new capital city. Nothing like it had been seen for three hundred years. To give it added legitimacy and potency, the king ordered that blocks from the greatest of all such monuments, the Great Pyramid of Khufu, at Giza, be transported to Itj-tawy and incorporated into the core of his own pyramid. Demolishing and cannibalizing the monument of an illustrious predecessor might appear sacrilegious, but it was an essential part of the renaissance plan. His successors of the Twelfth Dynasty would all follow his lead and build their own pyramids. Well might Amenemhat boast, “Kingship has become again what it was in the past!”5

  Having quelled internal rebellion, honored the gods, and begun a pyramid, Amenemhat I might have been tempted to think that the rebirth of Egyptian civilization was assured. However, foreign incursions from Palestine and Nubia during the First Intermediate Period had taught Egypt a hard lesson: its neighbors to the north and south had greedy eyes for the Nile Valley’s fertile pastures. Maintaining the country’s prosperity required active defense of its territorial integrity. Alive to the threat, the king directed his zeal toward securing the nation’s borders. His policy would set the scene for the following century and a half. Egypt would be turned into a fortress. The country’s northeastern frontier, along the margins of the delta, presented a particular challenge. The marshy terrain, crisscrossed by river branches and canals, made it difficult, if not impossible, to establish a fixed border, or to maintain watertight control over immigration from the impoverished lands of Palestine beyond. Amenemhat’s response was to order the construction of a series of fortified bases, strung out along the frontier zone, within signaling distance of each other. Regular patrols were dispatched from each garrison to monitor traffic across the border. In this way, these Walls of the Ruler might hope to prevent major incursions and could provide intelligence on any unusual movements. The emphasis on surveillance as a means of control was characteristic of the Twelfth Dynasty’s security policy.

  Egypt’s southern flank, its border with Nubia, posed a different threat and required a different solution. Ever since the expeditions of Harkhuf in the Sixth Dynasty, it had been clear that the peoples of Wawat (lower Nubia), closest to the Egyptian border, were reasserting their autonomy and forming states of their own, in direct defiance of Egyptian hegemony. With Egypt wracked by internal strife and civil war following the collapse of the Old Kingdom, this process merely accelerated. The reliance of the Theban army on Nubian mercenaries may have bolstered still further the Nubians’ own sense of nationhood. By the end of the Eleventh Dynasty, the situation could scarcely have been worse for the Egyptian king. Not only had he lost control over most of Wawat, but his very prestige was being openly challenged by local Nubian rulers who were using Egyptian royal titles. One such, styling himself “the Horus Ankhkhnumra, the King Wadjkara, the son of Ra Segerseni,” even referred to the Egyptians as “the enemies,” turning the established rhetoric on its head. Another, with the affrontery to call himself King Intef after the great Theban war leaders of the early Eleventh Dynasty, was confident enough to have a series of fifteen inscriptions cut into rocks at prominent locations throughout his territory. Such blatant insults to the might of Egypt could not be tolerated.

  A large number of inscriptions carved in the same region by Egyptian expeditions bear witness to a frenzy of activity from the early years of Amenemhat I’s reign. Even as he was bearing down on his opponents within Egypt, it appears his spies were at work in lower Nubia, carrying out maneuvers and gathering intelligence, in preparation for a full-scale assault. After two decades of preparations, during which order was restored at home, Egyptian forces regained control of the key site of Buhen, at the foot of the second Nile cataract, and started to turn it into a fortified base, to use as a springboard for military campaigns. By Amenemhat I’s twenty-ninth year on the throne, everything was ready. An expeditionary force led by his trusted vizier Intefiqer arrived from Egypt to overthrow Wawat. In his determination to snuff out any vestige of Nubian independence and to impose absolute Egyptian control over the wayward province, the king’s henchman showed no mercy to the local inhabitants, boasting:

  Then I killed the Nubians of the entire remainder of Wawat. I sailed upstream in victory, killing the Nubian upon his land; and I sailed downstream, uprooting crops and cutting down the remaining trees. I put their houses to the torch, as is done to a rebel against the king.6

  Amenemhat’s scorched-earth policy was designed not merely to punish Wawat but to send a powerful message to any other would-be insurgents. As for the unfortunate Nubians who watched from the riverbank as their land was devastated and their houses went up in flames, their fate was sealed. Before laying waste to Wawat, Intefiqer recorded that he was “busy building this compound.” The enclosure in question was a holding area (the ancient Egyptians might have preferred the modern euphemism “reception center”) for people conscripted for state labor. A life of servitude lay in store for the conquered inhabitants of Wawat. They and their descendants would toil to exploit the resources of their homeland for its new Egyptian masters.

  MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD

  UNEASY LIES THE HEAD THAT WEARS A CROWN—THE MORE SO WHEN that crown has been won by force rather than inherited by lawful succession. Amenemhat I, founder of a new dynasty and self-proclaimed renaissance king, was acutely conscious of his nonroyal origins and of the lingering resentment felt toward his rule in parts of Egypt, never mind in conquered Nubia. Anxious, above all, to consolidate his family’s grip on power and ensure a smooth succession, Amenemhat took the highly unusual, if not unprecedented, step of having his son and heir crowned king while he himself still reigned. Prince Senusret became co-regent at the end of Amenemhat’s second decade on the throne (circa 1918), and the two kings ruled jointly for a further decade. A few monuments bear joint dates, although for the most part Amenemhat seems to have been content for formal inscriptions to be dated to his son’s reign. The institution of co-regency became a feature of royal succession in the Twelfth Dynasty. It served its primary purpose of excluding any rival claimants to the throne until, after a further century and a half, the dynasty itself ran out of steam.

  But even this ultimate contingency could not protect
Amenemhat I from his regime’s many enemies. He had lived by the sword and he would perish in the same manner. A remarkable and unique text composed after his death has the dead king, like Old Hamlet, recalling the manner of his assassination to his son and successor:

  It was after supper and night had fallen. I was taking an hour of rest, lying on my bed, for I was weary. My mind was beginning to drift off, when weapons [meant] for defense were turned against me. I was like a snake of the desert. I awoke at the fighting … and found it was the guard about to strike. If I had seized weapons there and then, I would have made the buggers retreat … but no one is brave in the night, no one can fight alone.7

  Thus did the first tyrant of the Twelfth Dynasty meet his fate. But with a co-regent already on the throne, the desperate assassins had made a terrible miscalculation. In place of the father, the son assumed full power and lost no time in continuing the same policies, but with an added twist. Where overt oppression had failed, subtler methods would be deployed to win the battle for hearts and minds.

  Commissioning a work of literature on the theme of his father’s regicide was a bold step for Senusret I. It threatened the very ideology of divine kingship and broke a powerful taboo against discussing crises in public. But Senusret and his advisers were playing a clever game. They realized there was more to gain by publicizing the murder than by trying to hush it up. Back in the days of the civil war, provincial leaders such as Ankhtifi had used tales of crisis to emphasize their good deeds and legitimize their power. Now the political thought of the First Intermediate Period provided the foundations for the ruling ideology of the Twelfth Dynasty. By presenting the assassination of Amenemhat I in literary form to the elite of the royal court (the very individuals who posed the greatest threat to the king’s life), Senusret gave himself the perfect excuse for a crackdown. His father acquired the status of martyr, the son the role of devoted disciple. Before the Twelfth Dynasty, the Nile Valley had produced scarcely any literature worthy of the name. Ever practical, Egyptian society had had little time or space for mere wordsmiths. Now, Senusret realized, poets and authors might prove just as potent as army commanders.

  The flowering of literature in the Twelfth Dynasty ranks as one of the greatest cultural achievements of the Middle Kingdom. The works composed for the royal court, some of them undoubtedly at the king’s personal behest, are classics, dealing with complex themes and powerful emotions, but all in the service of the royal house. Amenemhat I had explored the possibilities of propagandist literature early in his reign, presenting himself in The Prophecies of Neferti as the savior of Egypt and the champion of cosmic order following a period of distress and calamity:

  A king will come from the south

  Ameny, the justified, his name …

  Then order will return to its [proper] place,

  And chaos will be driven out.8

  Senusret I’s litterati perfected the art with the composition of the outstanding masterpiece of ancient Egyptian literature, The Tale of Sinuhe. It is a fictional story of a courtier who flees Egypt on hearing of the assassination of Amenemhat I. Sinuhe finds refuge at the court of a Palestinian ruler and achieves both wealth and fame in exile. But as his life draws toward a close, he longs to return to Egypt, to embrace everything it stands for, and to be reconciled with the king, its supreme embodiment:

  May the king of Egypt be satisfied with me, that I may live at his pleasure.

  May I pay my respects to the mistress of the land who is in his palace,

  and hearken to her children’s bidding. Then my limbs will be rejuvenated.9

  The popularity of Sinuhe, which was read and reread for centuries after its composition, is due to its literary brilliance, its narrative flair, and its emotional impact. But the underlying theme of loyalty to the monarch is inextricably interwoven, running as a subliminal thread through the story. As a work both of literature and of propaganda, Sinuhe is exemplary.

  A rather more blatant example of political literature, The Loyalist Instruction, made loyalty to the king the guiding commandment for righteous living, urging all Egyptians to:

  Worship the king within your bodies,

  Be well disposed toward His Majesty in your minds.

  Cast dread of him daily;

  Create jubilation for him every instant.

  And, just in case that exhortation fell on deaf ears, there was a chilling reminder of the surveillance state to back it up:

  He sees what is in hearts;

  His eyes, they search out every body.10

  But despite this onslaught of textual injunctions to support the monarchy, the political unrest that had destabilized Egypt during Amenemhat I’s reign flared up again. A further expedition had to be dispatched into the Western Desert “to secure the land of the oasis dwellers,”11 while in the Nile Valley itself, temples at Djerty (modern Tod) and Abu, in the south of the country, were looted and destroyed. These acts of desecration were blamed on the usual suspects (Asiatics and Nubians) but were very probably stoked or supported by homegrown insurgents. The king’s forces succeeded in restoring law and order; the rebels were rounded up and executed by being burned alive as human torches. Senusret I then pointedly showered attention on local temples throughout the seven southernmost provinces of Egypt (the old “head of the south” and heartland of the Eleventh Dynasty). One of the most beautiful of his new buildings was a jubilee pavilion for the temple of Amun at Ipetsut. Its delicate reliefs, in fine white limestone, show the king and god embracing, a visual metaphor for the regime’s avowed legitimacy. Yet, side by side with this lofty imagery, the pavilion also demonstrates the Middle Kingdom obsession with bureaucracy. Along the base, the forty-two provinces of Egypt are enumerated, each with its representative deity, and the geographical extent of each province is given in river units (roughly six and a half miles). In Egyptian hands, a decorative scheme intended to demonstrate the all-embracing nature of the king’s rule could not resist including some purely statistical information of the kind beloved by bureaucrats.

  The fortress of Buhen at the second cataract COURTESY OF THE EGYPT EXPLORATION SOCIETY

  The administrative practices honed to perfection in provincial capitals the length and breadth of Egypt came in useful, too, for governing Egyptian-controlled lower Nubia. The campaign to overthrow Wawat, prosecuted nine years into the co-regency of Amenemhat I and Senusret I (circa 1909), paved the way for the formal annexation of Nubia as far south as the second cataract. Egypt demonstrated its hegemony in characteristic fashion, by embarking on massive state building projects, in this case fortresses to consolidate its subjugation of the local population. (The castles built by Edward I of England following his conquest and annexation of Wales are a more recent example of the same phenomenon.) The fortifications, strung out along the river between the first and second cataracts, were designed to withstand both surprise attack and protracted siege warfare—lessons learned, perhaps, during the civil war half a century earlier. Each fortress comprised a massive rectangular mud brick wall, further strengthened with external towers along the sides and at the corners. The landward wall was guarded by a deep ditch, while on the inner side a low parapet with semicircular bastions and downward-pointing loopholes for archers provided a secondary line of defense. All in all, the Nubian forts were marvels of military architecture, and they must have made a deep impression on the indigenous inhabitants, living alongside in their clusters of mud huts. With garrisons now stationed in impregnable bases guarding strategic points along the river (not least the main route to the gold and copper mines of the Eastern Desert), long-term Egyptian control of Wawat was assured. When, in Senusret’s eighteenth year on the throne, his army launched a further campaign as far as the third cataract, the general in charge, Mentuhotep, could boast with some justification of having “pacified the southerners.”

  FOREIGN ADVENTURES

  BY THE END OF SENUSRET I’S LONG REIGN OF NEARLY HALF A CENTURY (1918–1875), the troubles surrounding the beg
inning of the dynasty had been consigned to history. Egypt and lower Nubia were under the firm control of the central government. The gold, copper, and precious stones that poured into the royal workshops from mines in conquered Wawat provided craftsmen with the finest materials, enabling them to create jewelry, statuary, and objets d’art to beautify the royal court, enhance royal prestige, and swell the coffers of the state still further through long-distance trade in high-value luxury goods.